Seth Harrington, age 16, of Patterson, N.J., for his question:
WHEN DID THE ASSYRO BABYLONIAN LANGUAGE ORIGINATE?
Oldest known member of the Semitic languages is the Assyro Babylonian language. It is now extinct. It originated about 5,000 years ago and was the written and spoken language in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) from the 3rd to the 1st millennium B. C.
Also known as Akkadian, the Assyro Babylonian language displaced Sumerian, the earlier and unrelated language of Mesopotamia, after the Semitic ruler Sargon the Great (2335 2279 B.C.), founder of the dynasty of Akkad, conquered the region.
About 2400 B. C. Akkadian was first written down in the cuneiform script borrowed from the Sumerians. This script was not well adapted to writing the Akkadian (Semitic) sounds. Many of the difficulties were eventually solved, however, by orthographic reforms, particularly in the time of Babylonian king Hammurabi.
The language was deciphered in the 19th Century. It was written with about 600 words or syllable signs and it had 20 consonant and eight vowel sounds. Verbs had two tenses: past and present future. Nouns were feminine or masculine; were singular, dual or plural in number; and were declined in the nominative, genitive and accusative cases.
At the time of the breakup of the empire of Sumer and Akkad, about 1950 B.C., the Akkadian language was in general use throughout Mesopotamia and had already begun to replace Sumerian as the spoken language in Sumer (southern Mesopotamia) itself.
Also, the language appears to have been adopted as a political and religious language by the Elamites to the east and by the Guti, Lullians and Hurrians to the north and northeast.
After 1950 B.C. the Akkadian language broke up into two major dialects: Babylonian in the south and Assyrian in the north, each of which gradually underwent a number of changes. Babylonian became the dominant form and was used for literary purposes. The Assyrian dialect was used for economic and legal documents.
After 1200 B. C. when all of Syria and Anatolia (Asia Minor) was overrun by various waves of Sea Peoples (maritime nations), Aramaeans and others, the cultural and linguistic continuity in the western areas seemed to have been radically disturbed, but within Mesopotamia itself it continued unbroken.
Little by little, however, after 900 B.C. when the expanding Assyrian Empire came to include large numbers of Aramaeans, the Aramaic language began to supplant Assyrian as the spoken language, even in Assyria.
Meanwhile, Aramaic speaking tribes, including the Chaldeans, had infiltrated Babylonia. Although these tribes soon assimilated Babylonian culture and religion, they gradually made Aramaic the speech of a large segment of the population.
By the 4th century B.C., during the time of Alexander the Great, Babylonian had been replaced almost completely by Aramaic as the spoken language.